Albert Camus, Stranger in a Strange Land: New York

When a boat carrying Albert Camus sailed into New York Harbor in March 1946, he was hailed as a moral emissary from war-ravaged Europe and the glamorous embodiment of a newfangled philosophy known as Existentialism.

The American publication of his novel “The Stranger” was celebrated on the roof of the Hotel Astor, and Vogue published a portrait by Cecil Beaton, showing Camus smiling slyly from noirish shadows.

But a year later, Camus recalled his three months amid the city’s “swarming lights” and frantic streets with a mixture of awe and bafflement.

“I have my ideas about other cities but about New York only these powerful and fleeting emotions,” he wrote in 1947. “I still know nothing about New York, whether one moves among madmen here or among the most reasonable people in the world.”

Camus, who never returned to the United States, may not have really understood New York. But over the next month, New Yorkers will have a chance to better understand him, thanks to “Camus: A Stranger in the City,” a monthlong festival of performances, readings, film screenings and other events celebrating the 70th anniversary of his visit.

The festival will include plenty of straight-faced homage mixed with modern-day star power. On Monday, the actor Viggo Mortensen will read Camus’s landmark speech “The Human Crisis” at the Miller Theater at Columbia University, 70 years to the day after Camus delivered it in the same theater. And on April 19, the singer-songwriter Patti Smith will discuss Camus’s influence on her at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Stephen Petrus, a historian and curator who organized the festival in conjunction with the Camus estate, described the mission of the festival as “stimulating conversation by looking at his ideas about freedom, responsibility and civic engagement.”

Other participants are taking a distinctly sideways approach to that mission, like the jazz pianist, singer and composer Ben Sidran, who will kick things off at Barbès in Brooklyn on Saturday with a program that includes selections from his album “Blue Camus” as well as material written for the festival, like a song inspired by Camus’s 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”

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Albert Camus visited Times Square during his only trip to the United States in 1946. He wrote in his journal, “In the evening, crossing Broadway in a taxi, tired and feverish, I am literally stupefied by the circus of lights.”CreditWillie Davis for The New York Times

“The idea of being open to what comes next — of triumphing over absurdity and chaos by being yourself in the moment — has been a jazz precept for a long time,” Mr. Sidran said, explaining the logic of spending a Saturday night swinging to the idea of a Greek hero destined to roll the same rock up a hill day after day.

“Jazz and Existentialism have a lot of intersections that come up over and over,” he said.

When Camus landed in America, he was known mainly as the courageous former editor of the French Resistance newspaper Combat and the proponent of a new way of thinking. A month earlier, Hannah Arendt had discussed him and Jean-Paul Sartre in her article “What Is This Philosophy They Call ‘Existentialism’?” The New York Herald-Tribune proclaimed him the “boldest writer in France today.” The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section, meanwhile, found him seeming “unduly cheerful” for a philosopher of the absurd, a notion Camus gently rejected.

“Just because you have pessimistic thoughts you don’t have to act pessimistic,” he explained. “One has to pass the time somehow. Look at Don Juan.”

The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who will discuss Camus at the New York Public Library on April 14 with the historian Robert Zaretsky, described Camus’s visit as partly a “comedy of cross-cultural misunderstanding.”

Americans, Mr. Gopnik said, were bowled over by Camus’s glamour, mistakenly taking that Algerian-born, working-class outsider for the epitome of urbane Frenchness. (“You know, I can get a film contract whenever I want,” he boasted in a letter to his publisher.)

Meanwhile, Camus, who spoke almost no English, had some off-kilter perceptions of his own, like a cryptic reference to New York as the “city of the three rivers.”

“I’ve always loved that,” Mr. Gopnik said. “It’s not a description that makes any sense to New Yorkers. But it reflects something essential about New York as a place made up of many threads.”

The high point of Camus’s trip was the speech at Columbia, where as many as 1,500 people — well beyond the capacity of the McMillin Academic Theater, as the venue was then known — gathered to hear him warn about the modern “cult of efficiency and of abstraction” that led to indifference in the face of torture and murder.

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Chinatown in New York City, one of the neighborhoods Camus visited during his only trip to the United States in 1946.CreditWillie Davis for The New York Times

“The United States had been cut off from France during the war,” said the Yale French scholar Alice Kaplan. She has prepared a new translation of the speech for Mr. Mortensen to read, based on a long-lost French typescript she recently found in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.

Camus, “in a much more direct way than Sartre” — who had come to America the year before as a correspondent for Combat — “brought news of a new intellectual climate that came to be called Existentialism,” she said.

“Camus hated the label,” Ms. Kaplan added. “But there was little he could do about it.”

Even the serious occasion at Columbia was touched by an element of comedy, when it was announced that the collection taken up for helping French war orphans had been stolen during the talk.

“When Camus learned what had happened, he was ecstatic,” A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker wrote in an obituary after Camus’s death at 46, in 1960, in a car accident. The brush with B-movie larceny — followed by a second collection that raised even more money — “was the America of his dreams.”

During his trip, Camus made forays to Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston, speaking on college campuses. But mostly he stayed in New York, where he was staggered by the material abundance, in stark contrast to the deprivations of postwar France.

In Times Square, he was amazed by a 50-foot Camel billboard showing a cigarette-puffing G.I. (“Real smoke,” he marveled in his journal.) He was less impressed by American neckties: “You have to see it to believe it. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.”

Camus made the rounds of literary parties, and visited Chinatown, Coney Island, Harlem. He was fascinated by the down-and-out Bowery — “A European wants to say: ‘Finally, reality’” — with its rows of pristine bridal shop windows alongside squalid dives like Sammy’s Bowery Follies.

He also took an odd interest in American funeral parlors, with their zippy message, as he put it, of “You die, we do the rest!,” and even bought copies of trade magazines for undertakers, including one called Sunnyside.

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Albert Camus spent time at Sammy’s Bowery Follies, at 267 Bowery; it closed in 1970.CreditWillie Davis for The New York Times

“Portraying Camus as someone constantly preoccupied by heavy themes does his memory a great disservice,” Mr. Zaretsky said. “In New York, Camus mostly did what he would do in Paris: drink, dance and chat up women.”

Some festival events will revisit old Camus haunts, or their rough geographical approximations. At the Bowery Poetry Club on Sunday, the Belgian actor Ronald Guttman will do a reading of a one-man play based on Camus’s novel “The Fall,” set in the red-light district of Amsterdam. On April 10, at the same location, Mr. Petrus and the folk singer Eric Andersen will read selections from Camus’s writings on New York. (Mr. Andersen will also play songs from his album “Shadow and Light of Albert Camus” at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on April 16.)

But for the most part, the New York that Camus left in June 1946 — preceded by a 176-pound crate of coffee, baby food, powdered eggs, soap and other necessities — has vanished, washed away by a tide of money that makes the abundance that so staggered him pale in comparison.

More Camus in New York

Jazz CamusSaturday at 8 p.m. at Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, Brooklyn; barbesbrooklyn.com; $10 at the door. The jazz pianist, composer and singer Ben Sidran performs new works inspired by Camus and selections from his album “Blue Camus.”

An article on Friday about Albert Camus’s visit to New York City 70 years ago misspelled the name of the theater where Camus spoke at Columbia University and omitted part of its name. It was the McMillin Academic Theater, not the McMillan Theater. (It is now the Miller Theater.) The article was accompanied by a picture that was published in error and whose caption misidentified the building shown. The photograph was of Buell Hall where Columbia’s Maison Française is housed, not the Miller Theater.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C17 of the New York edition with the headline: Albert Camus, the Talk of the Town. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe